ICT news

• How Flock Cameras Wrongly Tracked a Journalist for Days, Then Sent Police to Arrest Him

  11-07-2026 16:34 via yro.slashdot.org
  "Are you armed?!" the police officer screamed. "Get out of the car!"A writer for the car-news site The Drive describes how "a technological chain linking surveillance cameras, AI, and law enforcement... led to me and my wife being surrounded by police, hands on their guns, in a Kohl's parking lot in suburban Minnesota."
  After dropping off our Amazon returns, we'd just gotten back in the Range Rover and reversed maybe two feet out of the spot when four cop cars came flying out of nowhere and boxe
  
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• Rust Will Help Linux Succeed and Makes Coding Fun, Says Greg Kroah-Hartman

  20-07-2026 06:20 via developers.slashdot.org
  ZDNet reports on June's Open Source Summit India 2026 in Mumbai, where Linux stable kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman gave a talk titled "Rust and Linux: How the Rust Language is Going to Help Linux Succeed."
  Kroah-Hartman said in his keynote that "the [Linux] kernel is moving toward Rust. Git is moving toward Rust. Lots of projects are starting to move toward Rust."
  He didn't always feel that way. Kroah-Hartman added, "A number of years ago, when a friend of mine said, 'Ah, you got to try th
  
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• As AI Transforms Silicon Valley, Some Tech Workers Face Evaporating Financial Security

  20-07-2026 04:15 via it.slashdot.org
  The Washington Post describes a mid-tier executive at Meta as one of Silicon Valley's "winners" whose financial security suddenly "evaporated" as their workforce "pushed headlong into AI and heavy job cuts," creating a transformed job market. "Her ex-husband, a designer at Meta who was laid off in 2020, eventually gave up looking for jobs in his profession. He now lifts boxes at a warehouse."
  Layoffs.fyi, which tracks announced job cuts, counts more than 800,000 tech workers laid off since 2022,
  
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• Zilog Z80 8-Bit CPU Turns 50, Open-source Replacement Heads To Drop-in DIP40 Silicon

  20-07-2026 02:50 via hardware.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader shared this report from Tom's Hardware:
  The Zilog Z80 has just turned 50 years old. This iconic 8-bit processor first went on sale in July 1976 and stayed in production for 48 years until Zilog, now a Littelfuse subsidiary, stopped accepting orders in June 2024. However, there's an open-source replacement closer than ever to shipping in the chip's original 40-pin DIP package thanks to community-funded fabrication...
  The chip powered the ZX Spectrum, TRS-80, MSX machines, Nint
  
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• Dozens of Robotaxi Riders Are Falling Asleep, Sparking Frantic Calls For Emergency Services

  20-07-2026 01:09 via tech.slashdot.org
  "If tired or wasted passengers fall asleep in a traditional taxi or rideshare, the driver can shout or shake them awake," reports Bloomberg. "Not so in a robotaxi..."Ditto Kasendar remembers soft music drifting from the robotaxi's speakers as he rode home late at night from a friend's birthday party in 2025. The next moment, Los Angeles firefighters were opening the door and asking if he was OK. His six-minute trip had ended nearly an hour before. A remote Waymo assistant, dialling in through th
  
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• California's 'Truth in Recycling' Law Blocked by Judge

  19-07-2026 23:04 via news.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader shared this report from the Los Angeles Times:A federal judge has halted California's groundbreaking "Truth in Recycling" law, which aims to reduce consumer confusion about which packaging can be recycled. [Originally planned to take effect October 4th], California's recyclable packaging law prohibits manufacturers from using a "chasing arrows" recycling symbol on products or materials unless they are actually being recycled in a meaningful way, which the law quantifies...
  A
  
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• James Webb Space Telescope Discovers How Black Holes Feed Themselves

  19-07-2026 21:05 via science.slashdot.org
  "Thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have been given a glimpse of the mechanisms that supermassive black holes use to feed themselves," reports Space.com:The powerful cosmic titans get really puzzling when astronomers using the JWST spot them before the universe was even 1 billion years old. That's because the mechanisms by which black holes devour matter to grow and then merge to create even more massive black holes should take at least 1 billion years to achieve supermassive
  
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• Robot 'Decapitated' in World's First-Ever Humanoid UFC Fight

  19-07-2026 19:49 via hardware.slashdot.org
  "A humanoid robot lost its head," reports Newsweek, "during the world's first free-combat tournament for full-sized humanoid robots."
  The Ultimate Robot Knock-out Legend competition began Thursday in Shenzhen, China, according to the article, with local robotics company EngineAI providing $40,000 of their "T800" robots (yes, named after The Terminator) to 32 participating teams from around the world:A video shared of the combat on YouTube by local news outlet Shenzhen Story, showed that even aft
  
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• Windows 10 Still Being Used, Often Unpatched and Insecure

  19-07-2026 18:34 via tech.slashdot.org
  Windows 10 still runs on 16.9% of the Windows devices monitored by asset-tracking service Lansweeper. That's more than one in six, The Register points out.
  A year ago, the operating system accounted for about half of the machines in its dataset, falling to the low-to-mid 40% range by the time Microsoft ended standard support. The decline continued after that, reaching 18.6% in June, but Lansweeper says migration has now slowed to a crawl... Small and medium-sized businesses are particularly expo
  
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• Aptera Announces US-Wide Repair Network for Its Upcoming Solar Electric Car

  19-07-2026 17:34 via tech.slashdot.org
  Solar car maker Aptera has "officially announced a repair network partnership which will give owners of its upcoming solar electric car access to thousands of repair shops nationwide," reports Electrek:We recently got a chance to drive the Aptera solar EV and tour the company's factory, and came away both impressed at the progress that has been made, but cognizant of the long road ahead for the company. One question that often gets raised in reference to EV startups is how owners get service on
  
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• Aptera Announces Nationwide Repair Network For Its Upcoming Solar Electric Car

  19-07-2026 17:34 via tech.slashdot.org
  Solar car maker Aptera has "officially announced a repair network partnership which will give owners of its upcoming solar electric car access to thousands of repair shops nationwide," reports Electrek:We recently got a chance to drive the Aptera solar EV and tour the company's factory, and came away both impressed at the progress that has been made, but cognizant of the long road ahead for the company. One question that often gets raised in reference to EV startups is how owners get service on
  
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• Former Richard Stallman Colleague Now Argues for Open AI Models Too

  19-07-2026 16:34 via news.slashdot.org
  Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes:
  Recalling his initial resistance to free and open software, billionaire computer scientist David Siegel argues vigorously in FORTUNE that the stakes are too high to let AI become increasingly closed. "In the 1980s, I had the chance to spend several years arguing about free and open software, what we now call open source, with the founder of the movement, Richard Stallman. My office at the MIT AI Lab was next door to his. Stallman's position was that the s
  
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• Are There Cybersecurity Risks in Over-the-Air Tech Used in Autos?

  19-07-2026 13:34 via tech.slashdot.org
  CNBC reports:
  The automotive industry's increasing use of over-the-air technology to update vehicle systems makes it more susceptible to cyberattacks, analysts say, urging more intervention in the sector... Its use represents "a unique national security concern," Gabriel Lim, senior analyst at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore, told CNBC. "Aside from data privacy concerns, the potential of a foreign actor sabotaging the controls of a moving vehicle is a possibility t
  
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• New Study Links Teen Boys' ADHD Symptoms To Addictive Social Media Use

  19-07-2026 09:34 via science.slashdot.org
  A new study by researchers at the University of California at San Francisco "adds to growing research linking increased social media use to detrimental effects on attention, memory and cognition," reports the Washington Post:The study followed more than 11,000 U.S. adolescents over a period of five years, with participants first asked about their own social media use at the average age of 12, and surveyed annually through the average age of 16. Researchers found that increases in addictive socia
  
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• 'Grok Build' Coding Tool Open Sourced This Week, Promises to Respect Zero Data Retention

  19-07-2026 05:34 via news.slashdot.org
  Elon Musk confirmed SpaceX has open sourced the Grok Build CLI this week, reports The Register, "just days after researchers caught the AI tool scooping up users' entire repositories and uploading them to company-controlled cloud storage."
  That discovery had "gathered so much negative attention that Elon Musk felt compelled to issue a public statement alongside SpaceX, and its technical staff, promising to delete all data that Grok Build has ever stored and give users more choice over how their
  
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• OpenAI Acknowledges GPT-5.6 May Accidentally Delete Files, Calls It 'Honest Mistake'

  19-07-2026 03:34 via developers.slashdot.org
  "OpenAI has finally confirmed reports that its latest family of large language models can accidentally delete files," reports InfoWorld, "while stressing that such incidents are rare and should be viewed as 'honest mistakes.'"Reports of the flagship LLMs deleting files emerged shortly after the company launched them earlier this month, with investor Matt Shumer taking to X to report that GPT-5.6-Sol had "just accidentally deleted almost all" of his Mac's files. Just days later, software engineer
  
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• France Orders ISPs to Block Access to Polymarket

  19-07-2026 02:17 via yro.slashdot.org
  France's regulatory authority for licensed gambling/betting games "announced this week that it ordered ISPs to block access to Polymarket," reports Engadget. Anyone caught advertising an unauthorized betting site "could be fined up to 100,000 euros, or around $114,000." (The article notes this follows a previous regulatory action from November placing a geoblock on financial transactions from French residents on Polymarket's site.)In May Spain blocked access to Polymarket and Kalshi while it lau
  
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• How Microsoft's 'Little Workaround' Created a Major Threat to America's Defense Department

  19-07-2026 01:17 via yro.slashdot.org
  This week Slashdot reader joshuark found the story of exactly how in 2025 ProPublica reporter Renee Dudley confirmed Microsoft was running tech support for the U.S. Defense Department through China, America's biggest cybersecurity adversary — and how that investigation ultimately changed U.S. government policy.
  The reporter first found an ad offering $18 to $28 to hire Americans as "digital escorts" for China-based tech support, then just searched LinkedIn for people who apparently had ans
  
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• Next UK Prime Minister Drops Digital ID Scheme

  19-07-2026 00:17 via news.slashdot.org
  Reuters reports:
  Incoming British prime minister Andy Burnham will scrap the government's troubled plans for a digital ID scheme when he enters office on Monday, a spokesperson for the new Labour Party leader said. Resources devoted to the scheme, deemed a "fiasco" by a cross-party committee of lawmakers, will be redirected to Burnham's priorities, the spokesperson said...
  "All the time and resource that was going to be spent on a national ID scheme will go instead to where it's most needed, suc
  
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• Gen Z and Millennials are Buying CDs - Though Half Don't Have CD Players

  18-07-2026 21:50 via entertainment.slashdot.org
  "Approximately half of Gen Z and millennials who have purchased a CD do not own a CD player," according to midyear sales statistics from entertainment data company Luminate. It's driven in part by "collection building", according to their report [PDF]:The CD has been recontextualized from a functional audio format into an
  affordable collectible. This behavior underscores that for younger generations, the act of buying
  physical music is as much about aesthetic ownership and direct financial suppo
  
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• NextBSD Returns to Port Apple Source Onto FreeBSD

  18-07-2026 20:46 via bsd.slashdot.org
  "One of the most interesting BSD variants of the 2010s, NextBSD, has come back to life under new management," reports The Register:
  Aside from the homepage, there's a GitHub repository — but beware, this is separate from the old one, whose repo is still there although the most recent changes were seven years ago. The new project also has a project history giving credit where it's due. The main man behind the revival is Joe Maloney, known on GitHub as pkgdemon. In case his name rings a bell
  
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• CNBC's Jim Cramer Says He Needs 'Cold Hard' Proof AI Is Paying Off

  18-07-2026 19:34 via slashdot.org
  In a sign of our times, CNBC's Jim Cramer "said Wednesday that it's time for companies to prove artificial intelligence is paying off," reports CNBC:
  "I need cold hard return facts," the "Mad Money" host said. "Or, I, too, will grow more skeptical than I am now...." While Cramer said he remains optimistic about the long-term opportunity, he argued the market needs more evidence that those investments are translating into measurable financial returns for customers. Cramer said one of his biggest
  
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• Long After Pluto Fly-By, NASA's New Horizon's Probe Wakes Up Again, Starts Doing New Science

  18-07-2026 18:34 via science.slashdot.org
  Launched in 2006, NASA's New Horizons probe flew by the planet Pluto in 2015. But this week it "awakened from its longest sleep ever," reports CNN.It's now 5.9 billion miles (9.5 billion kilometers) from Earth...
  NASA's New Horizons spacecraft went into a planned hibernation mode on August 7, 2025, and woke up on June 23 using commands stored on its main computer. The mission's flight controllers at the Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, confirmed that New
  
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• Union Fights Microsoft Over Layoffs at Game Studios

  18-07-2026 17:34 via games.slashdot.org
  Thursday the union that helped organize thousands of workers across numerous Microsoft-owned video game studios filed unfair labor complaints against Microsoft over the layoffs of 1,600 employees. The gaming news site Aftermath says the complaints allege unlawful action:
  "Xbox management is required to bargain with the union over the decision of layoffs prior to implementing them during the status quo period, and we are pursuing every available avenue to protect our members," a Communications Wo
  
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• The 'Death of the Stick Shift' is Almost Here for Americans

  18-07-2026 16:34 via tech.slashdot.org
  Last year just 0.6% of new vehicles made for U.S. customers were stick shifts, reports the Washington Post, citing preliminary government data.
  "That's a precipitous drop from the 34.6 percent of vehicles with manual transmissions produced in 1980."
  [T]he stick shift's popularity hit multiple new lows in recent years, with no signs of a turnaround, thanks to new technologies and a rapidly changing marketplace. Buyers and automakers increasingly have turned to the sophisticated automatic drivetra
  
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• Google-Backed Satellites For Wildfire Detection Launch As Smoke Chokes US, Canada

  18-07-2026 13:00 via news.slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: As smoke from hundreds of burning wildfires spread across Canada and the United States, the first three operational satellites in the Google-backed FireSat program successfully launched into orbit. The satellites will begin providing wildfire detection capable of spotting even small fires in the United States, Australia, and Europe before the end of the year. The launch of the microsatellites aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg S
  
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• Alien World Chemistry Found Inside Meteorite That Struck New Jersey Home

  18-07-2026 09:00 via science.slashdot.org
  Researchers say a meteorite that crashed through the roof of a Hillsborough, New Jersey, home in 2024 contains unusually pristine evidence of salty fluids and organic chemistry from near the surface of a primitive asteroid. "A forensic study of the fragments revealed that they contained preserved bits from near the surface of a primitive asteroid, where it experienced concentrated salty fluids -- a process not previously known from this type of protoplanet world," said lead author and meteor ast
  
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• Australia To Put Environmental Brakes On AI Data Centers

  18-07-2026 05:30 via slashdot.org
  An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Australia will require large data centers powering artificial intelligence to generate as much power as they consume, and ensure that creative professionals retain control over work that may be used to train A.I. systems, as the government sets up guardrails over the rapidly growing industry. The announcements on Wednesday in a speech by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese came as Australia draws significant interest from A.I. companies be
  
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• Steve Wozniak's Foundation Partners With Realbotix To Build AI Teacherbot

  18-07-2026 01:00 via hardware.slashdot.org
  "Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak's Woz Ed foundation is partnering with Realbotix, best known for their RealDoll-branded artificial companions, to deploy AI-powered robotic tutors in classrooms," writes Slashdot reader Hentes. "The doll will serve as a sort of artificial teaching assistant, helping students who get stuck or generating lessons. Students will be assigned an ID code, allowing the robot to provide personalized mentoring." NYS Focus reports: "This deployment in a working school distri
  
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• Xi Vows to Make AI for All in Debut at China's Top Tech Summit

  18-07-2026 00:00 via slashdot.org
  Xi Jinping used his first appearance at China's World AI Conference to promote a vision of low-cost, broadly accessible AI and call for international cooperation rather than technological rivalry. "AI development should not be a solo performance by a single country, but a symphony of international cooperation," he said. Bloomberg reports: His presence at the gathering, attended by scores of tech and government leaders, conveys a potent signal of China's ambitions to dominate a technological sphe
  
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